Bird Hearts

After the fifth extinction, 65.5 million years ago, bird life developed on earth. Through remnant genes of dinosaurs, bird species evolved to populate the air, the seas, and earth. Birds developed four chambers in their hearts, leaving behind, in time, the two-chamber models of fish and reptiles. Atria, ventria, complex hearts like mammals. Like humans.

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In the spring of 2015, in St. Paul and on sabbatical from my teaching job, I went a little mad. I cleaned the basement, all day long for a week, for the first time in 16 years of living in my 110-year-old house. Then I cleaned the garage, for the first time, and that took two weeks. When it warmed up enough to go outside, I dedicated myself to an area of garden that needed so much help it would take all summer. That was the kind of work I wanted—hard, engrossing, solo.

My father had died in early April, in Massachusetts. I had been with him in his hospital bed, one a.m., an oversized child terrified of what was happening in his father body inches from mine. I was 54 years old, he was 87, but it didn’t matter; I was six and about to be fatherless. He was hot; sepsis was overtaking him from within, outpacing the pneumonia we thought would get him, a former heavy smoker. He was unable to open his eyes or speak. The nurses turned him, for the third time in several hours, and left him akimbo, knees up and half-dropped over, his head back and mouth agape. He was journeying, hadn’t opened his eyes in two days, but grimaced at this rough treatment. I elbow-crawled alongside him, off the guest stretcher cot. Within a minute of the nurses leaving, his breathing changed, a rasp began. I cupped my palm over his chest, sensing his heat, letting him know he wasn’t alone. Under my hand his heart thrashed, like a starling in a net—and then there was nothing. No thrash, no breathing, just my hand on his unmoving chest. The bird, his heart, had stopped. I whispered into his ear that I loved him, and I thanked him for everything. I deposited my own heart into the net surrounding his and died a little with him.

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Home weeks later, I wandered the rooms of our St. Paul house. I didn’t eat much. I drank wine and water. I cried at nothing. I slept. Sleep gave me a rest from presenting myself, thanking people, reassuring everyone I was all right. When this period passed and the fact that I no longer had a father, no parents at all, taunted me from every chair, in every envelope, in my husband’s every T-shirt, the possession took hold. The need to work, to dog-paddle a survivable number of inches from grief’s riptide, became my only reason to get up in the morning. Not thinking, not feeling, sweeping the basement. Wearing a mask because of mold spores, but sweeping the basement. Vacuuming the cobwebs from the windows. Filling trash bags. Dusting. Throwing out anything hinting of mildew. Putting good-enough shelves together for shoes, dog food, light bulbs. Washing, drying, laying down old bath mats for flooring. Hanging anything hangable. Labeling anything unlabeled. All the while aware that this work was a gift from my father, who had loved to work. Working was a way to be with him, like when I was a child, shingling the house together, building the stone wall, bleeding the pipes, stirring the paint with a stick. I moved and solved problems and created order, all on instinct and screaming inside, my heart in the net of that blue-lit hospital room, bird hearts struggling to beat, bird hearts struggling. Bird.

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At Lake Phalen in St. Paul, there’s an unpaved path leading into woods where I go with my dog, Orso. One autumn morning in the year of my father’s death, Orso and I emerged from the trail into sun. A sudden sound and a movement overhead, and...